22 Nov 2016

I’ve come across some interesting and informative web posts that are good reads and worth your time! Every so often I’ll try to send to our website readers a few articles, columns, or reports that can help you stay on top of current cultural trends in sexuality and how to respond with biblical wisdom and compassion. Just a heads up: Not everything will be from a Christian perspective, nor will it always reflect what we think and believe, but if it has critical information or a careful perspective we should know about, I’ll post the link.

This is a long read, but well worth it! The New Atlantis Journal published its September 2016 issue entirely on sexuality and gender issues. The New Atlantis Journal

1. You can read this issue online, or you can download it as a PDF file. Drs. Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh write a summary of medical and social science research related to sexual orientation and gender identity. The report already has made a big impact.

Here are two sentences from it:

“The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings—the idea that people are ‘born that way’—is not supported by scientific evidence.”

“The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex—that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’—is not supported by scientific evidence.”

The New Atlantis is not a Christian journal, so it is important that this study rebuts the cultural/political mantra that sexual orientation and gender dysphoria are biologically caused. In other words, the issue is not settled as many proclaim. While some of its conclusions do not entirely align with Scripture’s view of sexuality and gender, it is, nevertheless, a careful examination of issues of causation and care for those who live with same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.

2. On the issue of gender and transgender, Dr. Robert Gagnon has a blog post responding to Dr. Mark Yarhouse responding to Gagnon’s response to Yarhouse’s Christianity Today article. I hope you were able to follow that.

How the church should respond to men and women with gender dysphoria is pastorally critical regarding faithfulness to Scripture in what it says and how we help those who struggle to obey Christ. Yarhouse and Gagnon are believers who care deeply about the gospel and how the church should apply it to people struggling with same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria. Our Transgender Resource Page already has links to Yarhouse’s CT article, as well as Gagnon’s first reply to that. Transgenderism Resources

Here’s the second round of their online conversation about pastoral care of someone dealing with gender dysphoria.

We appreciate both these men, and what they bring to the conversation on sexuality and gender. The more our society embraces secularism, the more complicated it will be for the church to help its victims. If you’re wondering where Harvest USA leans on this complicated transgender issue, we side more with Gagnon. We should be pastorally sensitive in helping the individual, patiently walking with that person, willing to flex with them in their struggle to follow God, but not in a way that affirms or encourages what is delusional in their struggle. There are some boundary lines that we believe would be wrong to cross in how we help someone.

3. Here’s a short read. Tim Keller posts a thought experiment about how one’s culture influences and shapes what we think and believe. “The Gay Anglo-Saxon Warrior.”

Our culture is constantly pressing in on us to “be ourselves,” and that all-important search to “find ourselves” is discovered internally, by how one feels. But our feelings are a blind guide to life. Cultural voices that call us to live in ways that entice us to disobey God are echoes of the original voice in the Garden, “Did God actually say….?”

Here are a few sentences to entice you to read this short excerpt from a book Keller wrote: “What does this thought experiment show us? Primarily it reveals that we do not get our identity simply from within. Rather, we receive some interpretive moral grid, lay it down over our various feelings and impulses, and sift them through it. This grid helps us decide which feelings are “me” and should be expressed—and which are not and should not be.”